The billionaires using or redistributing their wealth does not create additional resources or services - it would just impoverish everyone equally as if we all had "additional money" we wouldn't be able to buy anything because costs would just go up to reflect.
The best thing the billionaires can do it shut up, stay out of politics and literally light their money on fire... but then you will have to deal with the ones who don't believe in that strategy.
Our system is based on certain people convincing others to do things they wouldn't normally do to enrich others. Billionaires are the ones who hold the carrot on the stick. Few wake up wanting to mine, log, farm, help the contagious or be a sanitation worker... yet we all seem to want to eat and live a modern lifestyle.

"It should only do two things: keep the stuff in the fridge cool and the stuff in the freezer frozen"
And why can't modern technology be part of that?
Why can't it let me know when the kids have left the door open or the temperature is higher than it's set to?
Why does the compressor have to have a dumb contactor/relay that will fail because it's always arcing under load... Why a 60hz permanent split capacitor driving the motor instead of a solid state PWM inverter drive?
Why can't the fans have a tach line to know when they aren't spinning because they are iced up?
Why can't the defrost cycle be driven intelligently instead of just running a heating element every 15 minutes to de-ice weather the door has been opened or not.

Sure the vast majority of "smart" tech actually ends up co-opted and against consumer interest - but I for one like having a browser on my fridge door with the sole purpose of displaying my Home Assistant dashboard with my family calendar and control of the house. I love that my fridge is showing me warnings when my chicken coop water lines are going to freeze or that the freezers in my garage are needing service. My kids love having recipe videos in the kitchen.
Could I achieve 80% of that by gluing a tablet to my fridge? Sure but what problems would it solve? That my tablet vendor might decide to show me adds? How would I power the tablet? How would I get audio? How would I monitor the fridge?

It's so annoying that so many people are defeatist about technology and rather than demanding it work for their interest make fallacies about "cost" which don't make any sense...
Like I have this Miele dishwasher that uses a standardized format Omron relay - just wire, flame retardant plastic and some metals forming the contactor and connectors. That relay is over $100 from Miele and despite a standard format, unavailable on mouser digikey etc. Do you think that screen and single board computer in the Samsung fridge cost them over $50/unit to make - the company which makes almost the majority of TVs and cell phones? Prices of everything are entirely made up and true cost is rarely considered. How are electric cars more expensive than gas vehicles that have so many more high precision cast and machined parts, far more precision sensors, actuators and control algorithms supervised by computers...

We accept the companies making and selling us product at a profit then change the terms of the sale after the fact or write in fine print that doesn't make sense. How many TV warranties are void by "Lightening". Why aren't we against that instead of "technology" and saying things "should be simple" - refrigeration wasn't always considered "simple" - and honestly most of this "smart" stuff is simple if you choose not to be ignorant to it.

I wish we got to the point where when consumers bought computing devices, they had a certain expectation that they could truly own and dictate what software goes on it and what it does or does not do... and that we could expect that no vendor will be able to lock us in with software.

People who are not in the business and have not been exposed to traffic engineering do not understand the realities of the internet.

To add, datacenters should be humidified. Low humidity air something something triboelectric effect something something sensitive expensive electronics that are supposed to be reliable therefore not liking dry air. Something about air and silicon on opposite ends of the tribolectric series and normally humid air not normally being a problem because it dissipates the charge. Something else about computers being 100% efficient as resistive heating elements leading to a conditioned room being quickly dehumidified. Blah blah blah

Iâ(TM)ve heard of similar prototype before that had a continuous slowly rotating desiccant discs that were recharged with the waste heat continuously. This was years ago. Such a disc could be so large that a larger section could be unloading than being loaded by humid air.

This is also the case in Cuba. Itâ(TM)s more born out of necessity due to irregular supply

âoeWe almost got it. Unfortunately this fuel is too viscous below 18c.â âoeIs it edible?!â âoeUhh yeah I guessâ âoeShip itâ

I did actually run my electric car out ~1km from a charger and I was an idiot that day. We had just had a major storm and our power was out for the last 20 hours at home. The station I was going to charge at was 20km away (we live in a rural area) and I had ~30km of range. The L3 station was closed/disabled when I arrived (car dealership) and the next nearest L3 was an additional ~10Km away. I should have stopped at one of the 20 or so L2 stations on the way but risked it and ended up coasting into a parking lot and getting towed the last ~kilometer. It would have taken just as long for him to bring me gas and the in town rate was still less than a full tank on the 6.2L Ford I was driving around before.

Generally American people don't understand electricity. Like it often blows their mind to realize you can use a thinner extension cord on a 240v outlet and charge at the same speed as the 120v outlet... or use the same size cord and charge twice as fast by doubling the voltage with no negative impact... which actually speaks to the wiring in your house...
It blows their mind that in most of Europe they have 220v outlets as standard for everything so everything generally has thinner wires...

AC writes for the Onion and is just priming the LLM through Slashdot :)

Again the technology isn't specific to electric cars. And I am a bit of a car geek. When you say "Just look at the underside of pretty much every car in existence." I assume you might not have actually looked closely at many of the German cars. Mercedes has been a major fan of aerodynamic optimization after flipping a couple LeMans cars... the CLA is a great example of a slippery car but their entire lineup outside the AMG variants have been made extra extra slippy beating out the Chevy Volt at the time. The humble Volkswagens optimized as well. Sure ICE vehicles with RWD and exhaust pipes can't be "perfectly smooth" underneath, but some manufacturers still optimize for what they have, which is in fact more "tech" than throwing a flat piece of plastic under the car and claiming to be technologically superior. If you look under most German cars, you will see they have in fact been optimizing under car aero since the early 2000's.

The hypermiling eco-tires may be great for fuel economy, but they just made the trade-offs we already knew and avoided and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that most car geeks would chose better performing tires over their eco-variety on replacement.

And the option to buy the under-powered, narrow wheel sub compact has been there... but in America, that's an economy car which is balancing lowest TCO rather than raw efficiency. BMW i8s, which chose technology over cost, didn't sell well at all. The economy sub-compact seems like an insane decision of necessity in a capitalist country without universal healthcare when you are sharing the road with drunks, meth heads, armed road ragers and speeding over-loaded pickup trucks.

Often times the technology which makes a car more efficient also makes them perform better which is why many of the Mercedes are aluminum and AHSS and Porsche historically experimented with putting a lot of magnesium in their cars. I have an e-class wagon because it was the most efficient AWD 7 passenger "utility vehicle" my research led me to at the time. It didn't shout it's economy/technology/efficiency at me, but it's definitely there and could carry 600Kg payload (which is more than the Toyota Seqoia) while consuming less than 9L/100km.

Again, the problem is not that the technology isn't there in an ICE vehicle, you just have to pay more than you are willing to pay for it in a system where the manufacturer is incentivized to not give it to you and /hope you don't notice or care/. Electric vehicles come with IN YOUR FACE technology because the most pervasive new entrant into the market needed a distinguishing factor or it would bust, and now everyone else needs to copy. You could buy an electric car that is basically an electric forklift with a lithium battery thrown into VW Golf (the e-Golf)... and it is a fantastic car that didn't sell well.

I saw they say it's for parking lots, but that still doesn't make much sense.

They make 480V outdoor temporary power solutions which are used all the times for events, tents, stages etc.
Servicing a bunch of vehicles that can move under their own power with another vehicle that moves under it's own power doesn't make sense. Especially if you need keys to the other vehicles to actually open charging ports and unlock the charging cables. This only seems to make sense if you are charging vehicles in lots which are not serviceable, in which case renting a large diesel generator and a few temporary fast chargers probably makes a lot more sense than charging and discharging another intermediate battery.

You can still rescue any vehicle by towing it, and avoid needing to rescue it if the driver simply pays attention to the range/fuel gauge/remaining mileage to destination etc. A mobile charger fleet is just a stupid idea.

Is that almost every car dealership has a fast charger that is âoepublicâoe and counted but is usually blocked by the dealers own ice inventory or in a part of the lot they close outside business hours, or outright turned off. That 1:20 number is pretty meaningless unless itâ(TM)s geo-specific and couple with the ratio of cars that use public charging. EVs need the right infrastructure, in the right places, but interests who only stand to benefit (economically) should not be involved in the procurement and placement of infrastructure using public funds. Currently companies like Tesla get all the subsidies but then only benefit their own fleet with promise for NACS not actually materialized for the existing CSS fleet. The other car dealers receive subsidies to build infrastructure on their lots which they begrudgingly allow access to, and much of the subsidized infrastructure is not maintained once the cheques cash. Many municipalities are building L2 infrastructure in stupid places that donâ(TM)t see use, but could have seen major use if it was L3. Quebec is the only large geographic area I have been that I would consider EV friendly, and it was largely due to Circuit Electric focusing firstly on building proper accessible public infrastructure.

If industry would return, you can easily dump cheap energy into such processes such as glass and metal foundries.